To summarize the story, an adjunct professor, Thomas Klocek, got into an argument with a group of students at a student activity fair at DePaul University where he teaches--and when the students at the "Students for Justice in Palestine" complained, Mr. Klocek lost his job. He's how suing.

The money quote, from the last page of the article:

"I get accused of being against free speech," [DePaul University President Dr. Dennis] Holtschneider said. "But freedom of speech for students requires they have a professor who treats them with respect."

In other words, for the students to have freedom of speech, professors have to shut up.

Personally, I only have two points. First, if students are coddled in the way Dr. Holtschneider wishes to coddle them, those students will be ill-prepared for the real world where someone who disagrees with you cannot simply be fired and removed from the debate. This sort of therapeutic environment doesn't prepare students; it makes them ill-prepared, and puts them in a position where unless they grow a backbone, they will either withdraw from the public debate to a coocoon of like-minded people, or they will lash out and demand--as their university president did--that their freedom of speech is being denied by those who disagree with them.

Second, and on a related note, free speech requires protection not only of speech which is popular, but also speech which is unpopular. Only in a free marketplace of ideas can we arrive at the truth. But at DePaul University, by eliminating unpopular speech to "protect our children," Truth was not served. Unpopular speech was ended--and as a result, true free speech (and not the therapeutic version Dr. Holtschneider advocates) was destroyed.

posted by William Woody at 11:20 AMAccording to the students’ allegations, in the incident concerned, Klocek “continuously referred to Palestinians as ‘those people’ and went on to say that Palestinians ‘do not exist.’ ” If he had talked in the same way about the Jews to Jewish students, I would have little hesitation in treating his comments as anti-Semitic. I do not regard insisting that professors not display anti-Semitism towards Jewish students as unreasonable, and certainly not as an example of intellectual ‘coddling’. No university is obligated to provide a platform for anti-Semitic or Islamophobic views, anymore than they are required to provide a platform for idiots and frauds. They can always continue to contribute to the free marketplace of ideas from outside the campus. As a defender of free speech, I would not force a university to suspend a professor for expressing such views, but I could certainly understand why they might wish to do so. Especially if the pressure to do so came from within the university itself, rather than from a media firestorm. From the little I’ve read about the issue, I think it would probably have been better to caution Klocek than fire him, but then I wasn’t there.Contradictory Ben at 3:39 AM